Metalsmith is focus of Arida Arts Symposium

By KATIE WINKLERTimes-News Correspondent

Published: Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 4:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Friday, April 26, 2013 at 12:01 p.m.

Metalsmith Marilyn Bailey's fine jewelry has won international design competitions and been featured in one-woman shows in Boston and New York. Now the Hendersonville artist's work is being celebrated close to home.

Admission: Free, but reservations are recommended for the evening presentation.

Call 694-1735.

Bailey is the featured artist for the 2013 Arida Arts Symposium at Blue Ridge Community College, which takes place on Friday.

Bailey's artwork, found under her professional title of M.E. Bailey in fine arts galleries across the United States, is inspired primarily by forms and lines found in nature.

"From the time I could walk," she says, "my mother made such fun of hiking through the Michigan woods with my sisters and me, collecting berries, twigs, feathers — oh, just anything that caught our fancy. For me, it was nature's curves and textures that drew me first. Their elegant simplicity resonated deep within my body."

In 2004, her "hollowform bracelet" won in the silver category of the Saul Bell Design Competition, reflecting the elegant curves and textures she describes. The next year, a necklace won first place in the beads category. Bailey accounts the success of her jewelry to its "clean lines and light weight," inspired by the world around her and created through metalsmithing, which is at the heart of her work.

After completing her B.A. at North Michigan University, Bailey went on to study metalsmithing at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., where she studied under professor Richard Thomas, whose art and letters are included in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

At Cranbrook, Bailey experimented with different materials and techniques for repeatedly hammering and shaping metal, primarily gold and silver. She was particularly drawn to holloware, defined as a container or receptacle such as a bowl or a pitcher. She will feature one of these pieces, a reliquary or receptacle intended to hold a holy relic, at the symposium, along with other pivotal pieces, creating a retrospective of her career.

Although jewelry makes up a large part of Bailey's work, she continues to see herself as a metalsmith above all.

"I use techniques from metalsmithing to create jewelry," she says. "All my work is hammered from flat sheets of gold or silver."

She often uses a technique known as anticlastic raising, which she will demonstrate during the master class at the symposium.

A recent example of holloware art, a bowl adorned by metalsmithed petal pieces, has inspired a larger sculpture, a boat shape design — at once a return to her earlier work and a new venture. At the symposium exhibit, participants can view the holloware bowl, adorned with a piece of glass by Chaffe McIlhenney, celebrated artist at the 2008 Arida Arts Symposium.

Demonstrating her work and instructing others is not a new experience for Bailey. For the past 10 years, Bailey has been part of the staff at Camp Greystone for Girls in Tuxedo, where she is an instructor of metalsmithing and jewelry design. She enjoys working with high-schoolers, watching them grow through the art and craft of metal work. Recently, she discovered that two former campers have gone on to study metalsmithing in college, inspired by the work they did under her tutelage.

Arida connection

Having known Dr. Gamil Arida, in whose memory the Arida Arts Symposium was founded, and still maintaining a friendship with his wife, Ann Arida Talley, Bailey has even more reason to look forward to the celebration of her work.

"Gamil was so interested in the arts," she says, recalling how she continues to admire his work displayed at Arida Talley's Flat Rock home.

After the death of her husband in 1992, Ann Arida Talley and her children wanted to continue her husband's enduring passion for the arts through establishing an endowment at Blue Ridge Community College, where Arida taught philosophy and studied art.

"We didn't know what form the endowment should take," Arida Talley said.

Karen Jackson, the director of the BRCC Educational Foundation at the time, formed a committee of faculty and staff to brainstorm ideas for using the funds. Suggestions coming out of the committee included a permanent art exhibit of some kind and various types of scholarships for art students, but it was the idea of the symposium that resonated with the family.

In 1993, the first Arida Arts Symposium was held, celebrating the work of renowned poet and novelist Robert Morgan, author of "Gap Creek," and called by some the "poet laureate of Appalachia." It was a great success.

After this auspicious beginning, Arida Talley and her children agreed that a yearly celebration of area artists at BRCC, where students of the arts as well as community members could benefit from the expertise and inspiration of visiting artists, was the best way to honor her husband.

Publisher George Booth, founder of Cranbook Art Academy, where Bailey received her MFA in metalsmithing, began the college with the belief that the study of the arts is critical to the advancement of human culture. That, too, is the philosophy behind the Arida Arts Symposium at Blue Ridge Community College — one with which Arida, artist, poet, philosopher and patron of the arts, would wholeheartedly agree.

Katie Winkler teaches English composition, British literature and creative writing at Blue Ridge Community College.

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